


The Selfless Choice

by afterlithe



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-21
Updated: 2013-06-21
Packaged: 2017-12-15 17:34:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/852177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afterlithe/pseuds/afterlithe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And so, Amelia Pond gets away. She does what they always do – she grows up, and breaks your heart so that hers may keep on beating. She makes the choice you can never hate her for, and forces you to make the only choice you can live with. So you collapse on the grave of the woman you love, one way or the other, as a lonely god, now more than ever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Selfless Choice

You are not a good man – you know this with surprising certainty, a level of self-awareness no man should possess lest he go mad. So when River looks at you in that way of hers every time you bring up her mother’s name, eyes full of accusations of selfishness that she will never put into words, because she has taught herself never to let you see the hurt, has learned through experience you have enough demons of your own for her to verbally add hers to the bunch, you know that those accusations are true – you run to Amy Pond, not because you are a sentimental old man who’s never learned better, but because you are a selfish old man who does things in spite of knowing better. 

At first, you fool yourself into thinking it’s the will of the universe, because you’ve been unselfish with her once, leaving her behind with a nice car and a nice house and a nice husband, leaving her to a nice little life, and while that life may never be quite fulfilling for Amy Pond, the girl who’s had the universe pour into her in dreams, you know that it’s safe – you know that it’s the choice she would have made for herself and Rory if she knew better.

And all that only to be re-united with her at the hands of faith.

It does take time, but in the end you acknowledge that it was the selfishness of your 200 years older self, his refusal to die unless the last face his face saw was the first face he looked at with these eyes, that made the lines of your fates cross once more.

In the end you acknowledge that no matter how much you may try to control yourself, you can never quite deny yourself that one-more-time, never resist that urge to see your fiery ginger’s smile one last time before the universe takes her away from you by forcing her to grow up.

She has told you that once before – before you had opened her eyes to the wonders of the universe – that she had grown up, left behind her obsession for the mad man with the magical blue box, but you knew then that it was a lie. Amy Pond, with twenty-one years behind her and eyes wide with wonder, had been as far from a grown up as she was fourteen years ago. You never want to do that, you’d told her then – but after everything, you know that it was you who never wanted it, you who knew in your heart that one day, the universe, being the universe, would force your Amelia to grow up, to grow out of her dreams of the Raggedy Doctor. You knew that time would creep in through the cracks of the you-shaped home she’d built for herself, pour into her and expand her, until she could no longer fit inside the man she’d loved, in one way or the other, since she was a seven-year-old who prayed to Santa for a policeman to fix the crack on her wall. She was always going to learn, one day, the importance of being careful what she wished for. And knowing that hurt you in ways that could never be put to words.

Because time, in all its glorious cruelty, once again proves you right – your Amelia chooses the nice husband, the man she's learned to love, the man who always comes for her, without missing the mark by about a dozen years – forcing you to fit all the goodbyes you never wanted to say into the blink of an eye. 

This is where it comes into the picture – you are not a good man. Twelve hundred years have blurred it all out, and so, for all you know, you may have started out as one, though you doubt it, but in the end, the life you had would make a monster out of the best of men. For all your virtues, you’ve always been, predominantly, one thing: selfish. But whatever you are, whatever you may be, you meant it when you said it: Amelia Pond always gets what she wants, and especially from you. It just happens that this time, she knows what’s good for her. This time, she chooses for herself what you would never choose for her. This time, Amelia Pond grows up. 

Oh, the battle that fits into one minute of hesitation. The dilemma no man should ever face – To give Amelia Pond what she wants, what she deserves, or to keep her, keep her all for yourself. All the rules, all the walls you’ve built up to imprison yourself, blur into the background, and all you want is to hold on, hold on to her even if it makes the universe come shattering down around you. But in the end, you make the choice you always would. You make the selfless choice. You let her go – simply because you know you would never survive it if Amy Pond looked at you the way you look at yourself in the mirror.

And so, Amelia Pond gets away. She does what they always do – she grows up, and breaks your heart so that hers may keep on beating. She makes the choice you can never hate her for, and forces you to make the only choice you can live with. So you collapse on the grave of the woman you love, one way or the other, as a lonely god, now more than ever.

You are not a good man, but they have always been the best thing about you.


End file.
